I haven’t posted in a while, due mainly to a lack of motivation and a lack of projects to post about! However, I have just finished what for me has been quite a big jewellery project, involving many nights watching Family Guy while passing nylon bead thread through many tiny coral beads.

The jumping off point for the project was this broken homemade necklace:

It’s not clear from the photo how this would have looked when worn (sadly one of the strands was broken otherwise I would have put it on and taken a picture), but it consisted of three different-length strands of coral beads, interspersed with some rather horrid imitation pearls where the pearl finish had worn off, leaving naked plastic behind.

I decided to restring the necklace – again, it would have three strands, but they’d be of equal length and the plastic pearls would no longer feature. I ended up with three strands, each just over 17 inches long. I found four big coral beads to join the strands together; luckily these had huge holes, otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to fit three strands of nylon through them. Finally, I replaced the original gold-plated clasp with a sterling silver one.

This is the result:

As you can see for the last picture, I’ve extended the necklace using 1.2 mm thickness silver jump rings.

I’m pleased with the final result, although I think the necklace is crying out for an enhancer pendant set with turquoise/spiny oyster/pearl, along the lines of pieces by Carolyn Pollack/Relios. It would have to be a HUGE enhancer though. Maybe the charity shop fairy will be kind to me.